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cannot get Castle Wolfenstein working in IBM PC

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musicforlife

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Everytime when I try to play Castle Wolfenstein in IBM PC, what happens is that first it starts with the title screen and waits until I press enter. After pressing enter it goes to options screen. After the options screen when it creates the new map and starts new level and after that it immediately gets instantly into "you're caugh!" screen like in only 1 or 2 frames. Then it goes back to title screen but this time it never let me start the game again. It goes into a loop that while it shows "press enter to continue" but doesn't allow me to press anything and then it goes straight into "loading demo" and then again after loading what's supposed to be demo, same happens that "you're caugh!" instantly and then back to title screen. I can't do anything else in this loop than press ctrl-alt-del. This happens on both floppy disk and on hard drive.

What's going on? In Dosbox the same file set works just fine.

The gamefiles actually contains ibmbio.com and ibmdos.com so this game had its own bootable dos? It doesn't work for booting so I guess I would need command dos to copy system files but Is that really required?
 
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Might be running too fast. What specs is your PC? This game might be expecting 4.77 mhz cpu.
 
Are you trying to run it from a floppy drive? A lot of cracks fail when the program is not run from a hard drive like "everyone" else.

This is why we need proper Kryoflux dumps of everything.
 
SomeGuy said:
Are you trying to run it from a floppy drive? A lot of cracks fail when the program is not run from a hard drive like "everyone" else.

This is why we need proper Kryoflux dumps of everything.
Click to expand...

Again, I already mentioned that I tried both with floppy disk and hard drive and hard drive also fails.
 
How can there be a speed issue in 4.77Mhz processor? When the new level starts, there's nothing moving. The characters don't move / there's no time to move because it goes straight to "you're caugh!" screen.

Maybe someone else with IBM 5150 could test this too???
 
Maybe you don't have enough RAM? My 5150 isn't currently together or I would try it.
 
You didn't say where you downloaded it. I just grabbed a copy and tried it in the PCE emulator and it seemed to work fine.

In theory, timing issues could also be in the "too slow" range, or indicate a failure of a timing related motherboard component.

But this title looks like it was designed specifically for the 4.77mhz 8088 IBM PC + IBM CGA and does not adjust for faster computers at all. However when I start a level, the guards just roam back and forth until I move. Trying this natively on my modern-ish computer I see a couple of big blurs but nothing else happens until I move.

So, I'd try a fresh download, run a diagnostic program to test motherboard resources, and perhaps try a "clean" DOS boot disk.
 
Some cracks only work in emulators, because the cracker was an idiot. (No, I won't name names.) Try to find Castle Wolfenstein from a few different sources and try them all on your PC. You have a bad cracked version.

The game was written at a time when only the IBM PC existed, so it runs correctly only at 4.77 MHz speeds.
 
Trixter said:
Some cracks only work in emulators, because the cracker was an idiot. (No, I won't name names.) Try to find Castle Wolfenstein from a few different sources and try them all on your PC. You have a bad cracked version.

The game was written at a time when only the IBM PC existed, so it runs correctly only at 4.77 MHz speeds.
Click to expand...

SomeGuy said:
You didn't say where you downloaded it. I just grabbed a copy and tried it in the PCE emulator and it seemed to work fine.

In theory, timing issues could also be in the "too slow" range, or indicate a failure of a timing related motherboard component.

But this title looks like it was designed specifically for the 4.77mhz 8088 IBM PC + IBM CGA and does not adjust for faster computers at all. However when I start a level, the guards just roam back and forth until I move. Trying this natively on my modern-ish computer I see a couple of big blurs but nothing else happens until I move.

So, I'd try a fresh download, run a diagnostic program to test motherboard resources, and perhaps try a "clean" DOS boot disk.
Click to expand...


Practically I have tested every single download I can find and all of them causes the same issue. My 5150 hard drive is using DOS 3.2. I could try DOS 2.0 bootdisk but I doubt there would be any difference. I never had issues with any other game except this one so I can't see why and what would be wrong in my 5150 PC.


Plasma said:
Maybe you don't have enough RAM? My 5150 isn't currently together or I would try it.
Click to expand...

I suppose, 512kb should be enough? The manual only says that the requirements are IBM PC with DOS 1.0. 2.0 or 2.1.


EDIT: So using DOS 2.0 bootdisk did the trick! What's wrong with 3.2 then??? What could possibly make Castle Wolfenstein non-working in DOS 3.2???
 
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musicforlife said:
EDIT: So using DOS 2.0 bootdisk did the trick! What's wrong with 3.2 then??? What could possibly make Castle Wolfenstein non-working in DOS 3.2???
Click to expand...

Maybe the fact that 3.2 didn't exist when it was written? No software is perfect -- maybe there's some component of 3.2 that didn't properly emulate functionality present in 2.0. Or, maybe Castle Wolfenstein loads itself into fixed areas of memory (bad!) because the programmer didn't want to use DOS memory blocks. Who knows.

Let this be an example of why it's important to ensure you're reproducing the exact environment when trying to run problematic software.
 
Things changed internally after DOS 2.x. Ralf Brown covers this in some detail in his DOS interrupt list discussion. Just look for tables that say "DOS 2" and "DOS 3+". I'm not a bit surprised.
 
Veeeery interesting.

Tried it under a few different configurations with PCE, it did fail with DOS 3.2, but worked with DOS 3.3. Seems to be hit or miss depending on some odd factor, but not sure exactly what. Something in this program, or more likely the crack, is flaky.
 
SomeGuy said:
Veeeery interesting.

Tried it under a few different configurations with PCE, it did fail with DOS 3.2, but worked with DOS 3.3. Seems to be hit or miss depending on some odd factor, but not sure exactly what. Something in this program, or more likely the crack, is flaky.
Click to expand...

That's very interesting indeed.
 
There is a DOSBOX configuration file. I know that in Linux it's .dosbox subdirectory. I can't remember working with it in regular DOS or DOSBOX. In linux you edit "dosbox-0.74" it's where you can put the mount commands so that the program loads to a C: prompt (or whatever prompt you want). Near the top of the file there is a line:
machine=svga_s3
You can change it to hercules,cga, tandy pcjr etc etc
I hope that helps.
 
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